The Fish Out of Water Who Refused to Drown

For most of his life, Brad Benedict has been wrestling with two linked questions:
What happens to young people when their “Plan A” disappears?
And how do we build pathways so they do not get written off when it does?

He has attacked those questions the same way he has approached his own life—by refusing to accept that one path, one job, or one setback has the right to define you.

Benedict has been a popcorn kid at a movie theater, a golf course worker, a restaurant owner, a ceramics manufacturer, a Fortune 500 sales representative, and now a workforce advocate at Transfr, an ed-tech and economic development company that uses virtual reality to place students and jobseekers inside careers before they commit to them.

He sat down for an interview for Tutors, Mentors, and the City, a conversation series run by Kevin “Dotcom” Brown through The City Tutors, to talk about growing up in poverty, getting expelled from high school, finding mentors who bet on him, and why he wants the next generation to see more than one door in front of them.

“I joke that I’m a ‘Brad of all trades,’” he says. “But underneath that is something serious. I don’t want any young person to think one path, one job, or one mistake decides their whole life.”

What begins as a story about virtual reality turns out to be something else: a manual for what it means to fall hard, get back up, and then hold the ladder for someone else.

From popcorn room to poverty line

Benedict grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, born in nearby Lancaster—“Amish country on one side, cars flying past on the highway on the other.” Home was cramped and unstable. There were six people in a small house. Some nights there was no dinner. Some winters there was no money for heat.

“We were raised on government assistance,” he says. “You’re not just reading about poverty. You’re living it. You’re figuring out how to keep the lights on.”

His anchor was his grandmother, Linda Ann Pouts, who helped raise him while his mother managed her own mental health challenges. She worked relentlessly, pushed him to expect more of himself, and, in ways he did not fully understand at the time, kept the family from splintering.

Basketball became his escape hatch. He poured everything into it—hours in the gym, dreams of scholarships, visions of sports broadcasting and professional leagues. Plan A was clear. Plan B did not exist.

Then the knee injuries came. The family could not afford the kind of medical care and rehabilitation that might have preserved his shot. The dream ended abruptly, and with it went his sense of direction.

“When you’re fifteen and your only plan disappears, it’s devastating,” he says. “You don’t just lose a sport. You lose who you thought you were going to be.”

The anger and depression that followed collided with the pressures at home. By his junior year of high school, he was expelled.

“I should’ve been a forgotten statistic,” he says. “Expelled kid, working-class family, not a lot of support. I was right on that edge.”

The woman who opened the first door

When the school system closed its doors, the workforce was the only one left open. Benedict got his GED and went looking for full-time work—more out of necessity than ambition. His family needed income.

That is when Michelle, a local restaurant manager, changed his trajectory with a simple offer: show up at 6:30 a.m., five days a week, and you’ve got forty hours of work.

“She saw a kid who was angry and hurting but had potential,” he says. “She could have easily said no. Instead she said, ‘If you’re here, I’ll give you a shot.’”

Michelle did more than hand him a schedule. She modeled a different way to lead.

“She taught me, ‘Don’t ever ask someone to do what you’re not willing to do yourself,’” he says. “And she showed me that it’s less about what you do alone and more about what you can build with other people.”

The job gave him stability, skills, and a sense that he might have a future beyond the labels that followed his expulsion. In the middle of the grind—long shifts, tight margins, constant pressure—he was slowly building something the data never predicts: a work ethic, an eye for people, and a belief that he could climb.

Becoming a “fish out of water” on purpose

From there, Benedict’s résumé looks almost chaotic. He worked in ceramic manufacturing, learning precision and process on the shop floor. He ran his own restaurant for more than a decade, navigating payroll, staffing, customer service, and the fragile economics of small business. He moved into sales roles at Fortune 500 companies and worked tech support for a major cell phone provider.

Each move, he says, felt like another “fish out of water” moment.

“I’ve always been standing between worlds,” he says. “Lancaster and the highway. Poverty and corporate America. Sports and being expelled. Blue-collar manufacturing and ed tech.”

Those shifts built a rare literacy. He understands how production lines work, what frontline workers are asked to do with minimal training, how turnover breaks teams, and how employers think when margins are tight.

“Back then I didn’t know why any of it would matter,” he says. “Now, working in workforce development, it’s everything.”

Bringing the shop floor into the headset

Benedict’s path to Transfr started with frustration. In manufacturing, he watched new hires walk into complex environments with almost no preparation. The mismatch was brutal. Turnover was constant.

“You had folks handed precision tools they’d never seen before and told, ‘Go,’” he says. “People fail, and everyone loses.”

At Transfr, Benedict—now a Customer Success Manager, after two promotions—oversees platform adoption, leads training seminars, hosts speaking engagements, and brings his statistical analysis background from manufacturing into conversations about return on investment in education and workforce development.

Transfr’s model is simple: virtual reality experiences that allow learners to step inside jobs—diesel garages, healthcare settings, advanced manufacturing floors—before they ever step onto a real one.

“VR doesn’t replace real experience,” he says. “It’s the bridge. It gets you from ‘I have no idea what this is’ to ‘I’ve done this once before, and I’m not terrified.’”

He likes to call it “the Netflix of career exploration.”

“Do not let a single path define you”

Underneath the technology is a more human mission.

“Most people’s lives aren’t one job from nineteen to sixty-five,” he says. “Mine definitely isn’t.”

His advice is blunt: diversify your life. Try things. Build skills in more than one area. Look for open doors, not just the closed one. Slow down when brute force stops working.

“There are moments where you have to widen your vision before you move,” he says.

Grief, COVID, and the lessons that stay

Benedict’s grandmother Linda died early in the COVID pandemic.

“She was the person who raised me,” he says. “So much of who I am came from her.”

She had been a basketball player herself, in an era when women were literally required to play by different rules.

“She understood barriers,” he says. “Not talent gaps. Opportunity gaps.”

That loss shapes how he speaks to people in crisis.

“You can’t just tell someone it’ll get better,” he says. “Sometimes you sit with them first.”

Going back to school, on his own terms

At thirty-seven, Benedict returned to school. He is two classes away from an associate’s degree in marketing, with plans to continue toward a bachelor’s—on track to become the first in his family to earn a college degree.

“I wanted to prove to myself it’s never too late,” he says. “And practically, there are rooms I want to be in where a degree still matters.”

Building a life on knowledge and second chances

If there is a throughline in Benedict’s story, it is his belief that knowledge is leverage.

“Knowledge turns experiences into choices instead of traps,” he says.

It is why he believes in mentors. Why he believes in VR. Why he talks openly about expulsion, poverty, and grief.

“There’s some kid out there who thinks getting kicked out of school is the end,” he says. “If they hear my story and think, ‘Maybe it isn’t,’ that’s worth it.”

His life does not follow a straight line. It loops. It widens. It holds space for second chances.

What ties it together is a refusal to let one path—or one mistake—decide the rest.